Wild Thing

As firefighters and medical personnel staged operations at SL-1, a plume of radioactive gas silently made its way over the Idaho desert, creeping towards the nearby towns. How much of a risk did the e...

21 Jun 202232min

The only three people who really knew what had transpired at SL-1 were dead, and it would take months to determine what likely happened—plenty of time for rumors and gossip to take hold. Was there a l...

14 Jun 202224min

Two of the men working the reactor that night had personal problems. They hated each other. They fought with their bosses. And those problems could easily distract a man from his work—but what does th...

7 Jun 202221min

The horrifying devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki proved the destructive capabilities of nuclear power. But, in the aftermath of World War II, we started to experiment with how we could use atomic ...

31 Mai 202225min

How did we figure out that such a tiny particle—an atom—held all that power? For that matter, what is an atom? A primer on the basics of atomic energy—including its destructive capabilities—to help us...

24 Mai 202228min

Two dead men. One man missing. A hole blown in the side of the reactor. A cloud of radioactive gas so hot, it was off the charts. What happened with the SL-1 reactor feeds into our deep fear about the...

17 Mai 202223min

Back for its third season, Wild Thing uses science, history and culture to probe the realities of nuclear energy today, while analyzing our own fascination— and ambivalence—with all things atomic. Wha...

19 Apr 20222min

'Oumuamua is long gone—out of sight and almost impossible to reach. The excitement over it generated endless fascination about what (and who) might be out there. Ultimately, that’s what this search fo...

19 Nov 202027min